I don’t care what you’d planned to do for the next ten minutes. For the next ten minutes you need to read ELeven’s “Lifelong Companion”.
Smart, sexy, articulate, queer/AIDS activism is still very much alive, and you’ll find no better proof of this than Eric’s post.
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It’s an excellent post but it left me wondering what galvanizing event(s) will take place that will unite the younger generation against the virus. It seems to me something has to — pride parades and remembrance runs and bowls of condoms in bathhouses (in those places that have bathhouses) and flyers and billboards and poignant handholding bedside moments in sitcoms, miniseries and in badly lit indie movies aren’t enough.
They’re not enough to counterbalance Dawson’s 50 Load Weekend, and crystal, and the idiots in the dark room at (insert name of sex bar here), and bugchasers, and complacency, and fatalism, and fake bravery, and false machismo, and survivor guilt, and “fatigue”, and “manageable”, like “diabetes”, and that faint but insistent voice in the back of your mind that says it’s too much work to be good all the time and who dies from it anymore anyway and I don’t have any condoms on me so if I don’t find one there or if he doesn’t ask and i don’t offer…then it’s okay. Whatever “okay” is.
Long story:
I had a scare once, six or seven years ago. I had been chatting with two guys online who turned out to be boyfriends, and they conferred between themselves, and so we hooked up and we had a threesome. It was hot and lots of fun until as we were nearing our respective climaxes, i felt one of them slide his dick into me as I was sucking the other and I thought to myself, “Hm, that was different–that went in almost too easily,” and then he came and I *felt* it and I thought “What–the hell–was that??” It’s funny at that point when the mind splits in two–one half occupied with making your partner come and pretending that everything’s great, you’re into it, it’s hot, while the other half is thinking “Was he wearing something? What’s going on back there?” while it’s sending your free hand back to feel around to see if–yes, yes, that’s cum leaking out of me and what do I do now?
Thankfully the boyfriend came quickly enough and conveniently shot on my face, and then we did the ritual wiping up and brisk aimless chat, my heart pounding in my chest, my ears, as I lightly said “So, you shot your load inside me,” and he said “Yeah, that was fucking hot, I couldn’t hold it any longer,” and I said “Yeah it was, um, but you’re negative, right?” And where the next line–the “Of course, why, what did you think?” line–where that line was supposed to be, there was the hum of the fridge, the faint whirr of the overhead fan, the miniscule whine of the electric clock. And then those four life-changing words:
“You mean you are?”
I stayed very calm…slow and still…because at that moment I was technically insane. On the other hand, Mr. Shot-in-my-ass was more upset than I was, more upset than I could be, and then his boyfriend was more upset than I was, because you know they don’t keep their status a secret (socks on) and each one thought the other had said something (underwear on) and each one thought that I had said something to one or the other (jeans on) and, well, this is something they don’t do (shirt on), that they never do (hallway), and am I okay, (shoe) I’m being very quiet (shoe) and what should we do (coat), is there something we should do?
Mr. Shot-in-my-ass was near tears but I was just blank. No, I don’t know, I said, I, I’ll figure something out.
When I got home, when I opened the door to the apartment, all the thoughts that I had refused to think until I was alone and indoors flooded over me until I nearly fell, my head hot, my hands trembling, stars in my eyes like I’d been punched in the face. I called a poz friend who was well-connected with doctors and clinics and agencies and resources, and he picked up the phone and I just started babbling and eventually he pieced together what happened. I’m sure he thought I was in the middle of a crime scene. He told me to call my doctor as soon as I could in the morning and tell him or whoever was on the phone that I had been exposed to HIV and I wanted post-exposure prophylaxis.
Which I did, at 9:01 a.m. By 9:17 I was in his office, by 9:20 I had a thousand dollars worth of the worst, most toxic pills I’ve ever taken, and I was lucky to get them for free as they were the hand-me-down meds of people who had switched to other drugs or were dead and no longer needed them. And I took them every day for a month, and every day for a month I was sick, green-grey sick and curled into a ball, and I think every gay and bisexual man, safe or unsafe or whatever, should have to go onto those drugs for a month.
Because poisoning yourself every day for the rest of your life because you didn’t want to deal with a piece of rubber isn’t “manageable”, it isn’t like “diabetes” and it is not that much work to be good and if it is then do something else. It’s true that the two dozen friends I lost, I lost more than a decade ago, and maybe two or three friends who were poz have died since. But if you haven’t lost anyone, you haven’t seen what it looks like as it slowly erodes a person you love, if all you hear are rationalizations and selfishness and sentimentality…well.
It seems to me something has to make it hit home. And I just don’t know what that is.
David, I can’t adequately convey the impact of what you’ve shared, above. There are no words to describe the horror more accurately than the words you’ve written and, man, that’s some incredibly powerful stuff, right there.
We need to start talking again about HIV and AIDS the way we were talking 20 years ago. I want to do more. Thank you for sharing that. I’m going to do more. I need to do more.
Thanks Brett. Here’s some more food for thought for those who think HIV/AIDS has evolved from deadly plague to minor inconvenience:
NYT: AIDS Patients Face Downside of Living Longer
“Mr. Holloway (59), who lives in a housing complex designed for the frail elderly, suffers from complex health problems usually associated with advanced age: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, kidney failure, a bleeding ulcer, severe depression, rectal cancer and the lingering effects of a broken hip.
“Those illnesses, more severe than his 84-year-old father’s, are not what Mr. Holloway expected when lifesaving antiretroviral drugs became the standard of care in the mid-1990s.
“The drugs gave Mr. Holloway back his future.
“But at what cost?”
At what cost, indeed.
David,
Wonderful story. Thanks for taking us there. Whether we figure out what is needed to hit home now or later, stories like yours are much needed and entirely necessary to push the conversation forward. To read this story, for those who care or have yet to realize their ability to care, it inevitably makes us safer and wiser and causes us to have more concern as to the choices and situations we’ll make and in which we’ll find ourselves.
“They’re not enough to counterbalance Dawson’s 50 Load Weekend, and crystal, and the idiots in the dark room at (insert name of sex bar here), and bugchasers”
When AIDS first came out, there was a cartoon in the Toronto Sun of two gay men walking out of a bath-house holding hands, pointing at Joe Taxpayer and saying “Send the bill to him.”
It was considered quite offensive at the time, but was actually a prophecy. What do you do when people do nothing to avoid infection? Then again, what do you do when people eat processed food or smoke?
Thank you for sharing this.
This is an issue that needs to remain in the spotlight until the last person is cured and the disease is no more.
The level of apathy that is in place toward this disease, by way of educating people, is scary. Younger people, like my sister (12 years younger than me) would blush when I mentioned the word “condom”. She (and her friends) have that mentality of “I can’t get it”. I kept at her with the safe sex & drug talks. Thankfully she listened. From what I understand (I had moved to NYC before she reached High School) some of her “friends” ended up with STDs. Not sure which ones.
I worked in Juvenile, at a Court House, during college. I was trusted enough to be one of the few who had access to the files. The files just didn’t contain info on kids who were caught stealing, there would be files of children who were born with the disease, passed onto them by a parent who were infected.
Many of these files were only a few pages, due to the child dying.
I can clearly remember a day when one of these “parents” came into the office to talk about their court date. The woman so uncaring of what she had passed along, so nonchalant, that I had the urge to jump the front desk and punch her. Wanting her to know real, physical pain.
From what I found out, the child was covered in sores and could not be touched by human hands. The child would not reach the age of 1.
I am lucky to have a Mother who worked at a Blood Bank. She has a very logical approach about life. If I asked a question she would tell me the truth. Nothing was sugar coated either. When it came to the talk about AIDS/HIV, she gave me the tools to protect myself.
Education in schools need to stop being PC about what this disease can do. Who it effects.
Sorry for turning this into a long post. I was just going to write you a thank you.
Please don’t apologize! All of these stories are so important.
How did we come to not talk plainly about this any more? Was it that we didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings — whether we actually were doing so or not — and have endangered more lives as a result?
I think that’s it. We became too sensitive to the point of not talking. Now, it’s looking like this next generation is going to be “blind” due to the silence.